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Last Friday, both Nokia and Research in Motion fired back at Apple in the immediate hours following Steve Jobs' press conference to mitigate the severity of the Death Grip, announce a free case program, and generalize the iPhone 4's antenna issues to the smartphone industry as a whole. As expected, the mobile phone makers that Apple called out did not respond favorably to the sweeping allegations made to the entire world.

And today, both HTC and Samsung have responded to claims that their products have similar if not worse antenna and reception problems. The Wall Street Journal is where HTC turned to get their message across to everyone: poor reception and dropped calls due to improperly holding a phone aren't as widespread and universal as Apple made them appear to be. Hui-Meng Cheng, the company's CFO, said that "the reception problems are certainly not common among smartphones." Adding that Apple should correct its design flaws and leave competitors out of the argument, Cheng concluded that Apple "apparently didn't give operators enough time to test the phone."

It should be noted, however, that Daring Fireball responded to HTC's statement Monday by reference a portion of HTC's instruction manual for the Droid Eris which clearly states (and punctuates with a photo) that the device shouldn't be touched or held over the part of the device where the antenna is housed. From the manual: "Avoiding contact with the antenna area when the phone is IN USE optimizes the antenna performance and the battery life."

Samsung, meanwhile, also has a stake in this fight as Apple called out the Omnia II and pointed to analogous reception bugs. Samsung, however, wanted to make it clear in a statement today that the company simply "hasn't received significant customer feedback on any signal reduction issue for the Omnia II." The terse response from Samsung followed Apple's hands-on demonstration of the similarly "flawed" Omnia II last week.

Apple, which has sold in excess of three million iPhone 4s since last month, will distribute free cases to every iPhone 4 customer through Sept. 30 - a move that Apple is obviously hoping will put the "Death Grip" issue to rest once and for all.